Last month on a rainy grey morning in north-east England I headed to the Daresbury Laboratory as the SuperSTEM lab there celebrated the installation of its latest world-class microscope. Industrial and academic microscopists from around the world gathered for the inauguration, which was described as a “wedding for microscopists” because so many people from the tightly knit microscopy community were there. You can hear the excitement in the audio piece below, where SuperSTEM lab director Quentin Ramasse and other researchers at the event tell me their plans for the new instrument.

Daresbury Laboratory: SuperSTEM is the small, white building right of centre and surrounded by trees. (Courtesy: STFC)

By Hamish Johnston

Recently I was in Liverpool with the Physics World camera crew to film a series of videos, including a feature about the NA62 experiment based at CERN. On the way back to Bristol we spent the afternoon at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, where we made videos about two major facilities at that lab.

Today, we are premiering the video that we made about Daresbury’s SuperSTEM, which is the UK’s national facility for aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM).

Earlier this week the Physics World film crew was on Merseyside to document some of the exciting physics done in Liverpool and its environs. Our first stop was a meeting of the NA62 collaboration at the University of Liverpool that was organized by the particle physicist John Fry (above right with our cameraman David Hart).

The finishing touches are currently being put on the NA62 experiment, which will start up at CERN in Geneva next year. The international collaboration running the experiment will focus on making precise measurements of the decay of a charged kaon to a pion and two neutrinos. If all goes to plan, NA62 could find that the decay is not completely described by the Standard Model of particle physics, which could point towards new and exciting physics.

Earlier this week my colleague reported the death of Heinrich Rohrer, the Swiss condensed-matter physicist who shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) at IBM’s Zürich Research Laboratory. Rohrer shared one half of the prize with his IBM colleague Gerd Binnig, while the other half went to the West German Ernst Ruska for his invention of the electron microscope (EM).

By bringing into view the atomic world, EMs and STMs have undoubtedly had a huge impact on science. Before their invention, optical microscopy had been a truly transformative technology. But it had been fundamentally limited to seeing things that are (roughly speaking) larger than the wavelength of the light used to produce the image. And since the wavelength of visible light is some 10,000 times larger than the typical distance between two atoms, we could not see individual atoms.